Android App Review: Toss It

Overview

The Good: Toss It is a challenging game that combines simple goals with the user’s practiced skill; low, low cost of $0.00 (that means FREE, people).

The Bad: How could a simple time waster be bad?

The Verdict: If reading a few pages of an e-book aren’t your thing when you’ve got a few minutes to spare, I would highly recommend you check out Toss It.

Review

Toss It has taken over my house as the go-to time waster app for Android. My wife initially downloaded it and then I reluctantly agreed to give it a try. I have to admit I was hooked pretty quickly, or at least as hooked as I get on these types of things.

Toss It combines skill-building exercise of repetitive motion with the addition of the element of variation. The concept is very simple, flick a wadded-up ball of paper into a trash can. The element of variation is added with a fan that switches direction and speed, making it much more difficult to determine the direction and force with which to initially flick the ball. Once the paper ball hits the wind from the fan, it immediately moves in the direction of the moving air. If you’ve got mad skills, or are lucky, the ball will drop into the trashcan, otherwise it will fall to the floor. The goal is to get as many balls into the can as possible. Additionally, the more balls make it in the can in a row (creating a “streak”), the more points that are awarded.

The free version of the app is ad supported and includes four levels of varying degrees of difficulty. To add even greater difficulty, the user can turn off the numerical description of the wind speed and just use the length of the directional arrow to indicate wind-strength.

A list of the top 25 global high scores is available for viewing. If you are addicted, and good enough, to try to make the list, you should fill out your profile information with a customized username and email address.

An interesting feature that I’ve never been hard-core enough to use is the challenge feature. Essentially, if I understand the concept correctly, a user can challenge another user, either directly or by making the challenge available to anyone. The challenger then bets with fake currency, which can be purchased with real currency (hmmm...), that they are more skilled than the challengee (may not be a real word, but you know what I mean). If the challenger wins, they get half of the challengee’s fake currency. Anyone who has tried this feature out, please feel free to correct me in the comments as I’m not confident that I’ve got that right, but that’s my best effort at an explanation.

Toss It Pro, the paid version of the app, is available for $3.99 and removes the adds and adds additional levels. Not that I don’t want to support Android Developers, but I’d start with the free version and see if you dig it as much as my wife and I do. A link to the paid version is available from within the app, so you won’t have to search very far to make the upgrade.

If you enjoy Toss It as your time waster of choice, or if you have a better explanation of the challenge feature, please let us know in the comments!

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